Dear X:
How are things going for you? Happy New Year! I know we haven’t been connecting for a bit but true friendship doesn’t get devalued over time rather, as time goes on, the relationship is only more mature so that their hearts and blood are always bonded. (To a certain degree, how is friendship different from love without physical contact?). Today, I want to ‘evade’ away from criminal justice a little bit and talk about us.
X, we are all lonely souls who crave someone to warm our cold hearts. No man is an island but humans are all lonely. From the primitive age to now, our society has been changing on its face but boiling down to the heart it remains the same that a society is always built on the social interactions of people. We developed cultures because people had their own norms, preferences, and ways of living, which divided them into groups. These norms, beliefs, values, and thinking were so different from each other that collisions were ultimately unavoidable. It eventually came to the point that the group, larger in population but weaker in power, wanted to fight for their own benefits, so they strove against the fierce tide and advocated for themselves. In the middle of blood and tears, democracy was formed.
From a broad perspective, what matters for a society is the commonalities of people. This reflects on things, such as identity politics, the shared characteristics of elected politicians and their constituents, and myriad forms of policy groups. However, individuals, albeit what makes them common, are also so different from each other just like no two leaves are identical. When a society has paid too much attention to the mutual benefits and goals, individual characteristics are often ignored, but they are what make us us. Loneliness is a side product.
The feeling of loneliness is both material and symbolic. It is that your friends have not reached out to you for a while and your desire to see them back just reemerged in your heart. It is the moment when you have no one to talk to, no one to walk together on the street, hanging out. But a person, no matter how good he is at socializing, could feel loneliness. Why? Because on a higher level, loneliness is more of the distance between hearts than physical proximity. It is the experience of traveling to the seashore just to watch the tide rise and fall, the un-fulfillment of climbing to the highest point of a mountain and leaving a sigh that you never hear the echo of your soul, the sorrow that you haven’t found another person someone on this ultimate path, the path to the realization of your dream, belief, life value, and simply who you are. Loneliness can exist in any relationship beyond family, love, or friendship. It is a common feeling that society has created to remind us that we are humans with emotions, humans who need to be understood and heard.
X, the rain has been hitting my window for a whole afternoon as I was working on this piece, and hearing the rain, it was incredibly lonely and fulfilling at the same time. A few Chinese poems came to my mind, and they flew away. Tomorrow will be a sunny day and so is the day after. “This is just life”, I thought, “sunrise and sunset, rain and sunny, complete and incomplete”. Ambitious people hope for too much, but in the end, they often forget to take care of themselves. We all need to love ourselves and be loved.
X, humans are all lonely, and this feeling is mutual and eternal.